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My Baby Girl Carl Sandburg february 10, 1912 It was just a week ago she came. Only seven days ago I saw her writhe and take breath, heard her Wrst plaintive cry to her Wrst morning in the world. And when I walked away from the hospital in early gray daylight with a fresh rain smell in the air, treading the blown-down and scattered catalpa blossoms under my heels, I had above all else a new sense of a sacredness of life. A grand, original something the full equal of death or Wrst love or marriage as an experience, this I knew I had touched. The whole white army of girl childhood was a trembling soft wonder I now understood better. All that day and the next, however, I was compelled to draw on my resources of patience and humor. The remark of a startlingly large number of my friends was: “Too bad it’s a girl.” I learned it for the Wrst time to be positively true that fathers and mothers generally know what they prefer as a Wrst child and they prefer boys to girls. Could they have their choice from the God of Things as They Are, they would say: “Give us a boy.” And so, while a few understood my joy, some actually took it as a half-grief, a kind of sorrow, and commiserated me: “Too bad it’s a girl.” Thus at the very start of life, prejudices and dispreferences follow the footsteps of one sex as against another. “It is better to be a boy than a girl, better to be a man than a woman.” This was the undertone and the oversong of those who pro¤ered me gratulations. And I have wondered how far they are right. Tonight however, as I hold in my arms for a few moments, this new-come beginner in the game of life, I think I would as lief be this baby girl as any man alive. For this baby girl, as sure as luck and health stay by her, shall see wonder on wonder that will be denied to our eyes. If she lives out Wfty years, she will be a mingler in and a witness upon changes, developments, and advances that baºe all prophecy and forecast by us today. In her years, many new shapings will be worked on the hard mechanisms of wealth production, the curious codes of law and justice, and the heartstrings of human mercy and brotherhood. She shall see women go forward and cast ballots and speak and write and with passionate earnestness take part in political movements. She shall sit in a gallery in the 79 House of Representatives in Washington and listen to the words of a woman member of that body. She shall know the Wnal destiny of the war game. Perhaps, even, she or her lover may watch with their own eyes Xeets of air battlers so deadly destructive with explosives hurled at helpless cities below that the war game is abandoned forever and the nations of the earth disarm their troops and dismantle their navies. She—this little soft-breathing thing in my arms—will be alive when typhoid, tuberculosis and babies born blind have become forgotten, improbable things. We are moving that way today. We edge toward it every year. We imagine and picture it. But she, my baby girl, will walk the streets of cities from which all dangers of the now commonest and deadliest diseases have been driven out. In this week, when her name is registered among the births, woman, the common woman—the wife of the workingman—is the slave of a slave, cooking, sewing, washing , cleaning, nursing in sickness, and rendering a hundred personal services daily for a man who is himself not in power to dictate a constant job and living wage for himself. My baby girl shall see the slave achieve freedom for himself and his class, and “the slave of a slave” broken away from the harsh interests that hold him in the dark today. So rapid and sweeping are some of the advancements today, that I think it possible that the wise sweet mother who bore her, and I, her father, may look on these things forecasted. But whether we see them or not, sure it is that the world is moving forward with strides so fast and vast that all the Tribe of Intelligence agree that these and more beyond our reckoning...

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